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Spawning in a thread offers you no protection whatsoever; a segfault will still crash the entire BEAM.
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That’s why ports are still safer; you probably aren’t going to run both a port and a nif. But even ports don’t give you supervision, so zombie processes can be a thing.
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That’s exactly the nif vs port trade-off. One last thing to remember is if you do read a binary in a separate thread, to read the binary from the environment of the new thread, otherwise the GC could take the binary away from under you and cause a segfault… I think. This is one of the reasons why nifs are hard.
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You don’t typically need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH for nifs; you can give an absolute path to the nif load call, which I believe is instrumented in @after_compile
